Small, yet leading by example

While Portugal has more than doubled its quota to accommodate refugees, other E.U. countries are building fences and sealing off Europe’s internal borders. A deal with Turkey to secure this closure has been criticized as a moral failure. (Read more…)

A quote by William Arthur Ward, “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails”, decorates a room where Rui Marques welcomes the visitors at Padre Antonio Vieira Institute (IPAV), in Lisbon. It is also a life motto to the coordinator of the Refugee Support Platform (PAR). And it perfectly describes how Portugal is reacting to the world’s worst refugee crisis since Word War II.

Despite being a small country experiencing an economic crisis, Portugal has committed to receiving up to 10,000 refugees. It more than doubles its 4,486 quota under a European Union plan to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers stranded in the frontline states of Greece and Italy.

By June, Portugal has taken in 417 refugees [this number increased to 555 in September – 372 coming from Greece and 183 from Italy], mostly Syrians, Iraqis and Eritreans. Initially small, due to bureaucratic and logistic difficulties, the number of arrivals has been growing every week. The country is already the second largest host, after France (735), under the E.U. Relocation and Resettlement Program.

“It’s a great effort if we bear in mind that, altogether, the 28 E.U. countries accepted to relocate only 7,000 refugees [of the total number of 160,000],” says Rui Marques in an interview.

“Portugal had all the excuses to close the door: a distant geographical location, high unemployment, and the fact that there is no Muslim communities here like in Germany, for example. In spite of our limitations, we have been very pro-active and available. We have set in motion the ability to put ourselves in others’ shoes.”

PAR is one of five Portuguese organizations involved in this national endeavor. It operates like a broad network with 300 members comprising foundations, universities, companies, and municipalities, more than 100 members who are host institutions, and 8,000 individual volunteers.

Refugee families, as the “most vulnerable”, are PAR’s priority, says Rui Marques. Host institutions offer each family free housing and access to education, work, medical treatment, and a monthly stipend to buy their food, medicine, for transport, and telecommunications.

To accommodate more that 4,500 refugees in the next two years, Portugal was promised by the E.U. almost €70.369 million until 2020. The annual contribution of the Portuguese government is €6,000 for each adult and €4,500 for each child.

Despite proposals of financial compensation, too many countries are closing down some of the paths used to get people into the E.U..

Hungary has built razor-wire barriers on its borders with Serbia and Croatia. Austria erected a four-kilometer fence at the Slovenian border. Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia are imposing harsher restrictions.

Rui Marques is proud of Portugal’s “example of European solidarity.” But he worries that it might be hindered by a controversial EU-Turkey refugee deal approved last March [2016].

The arrangement was praised by Germany as “a humane alternative to sealing off Europe’s borders”. It offers President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan €6 billion and political concessions, such as visa-free travel and negotiations for EU membership, if his government takes back refugees who reach Greece via Turkey.

Nearly 1.1 million refugees entered Germany in 2015. In April 2016, after the deal was put in place, only around 16,000 arrived, a smaller number when compared with the 120,000 that reached the country last December.

Arrivals through Greece have also dropped, from 26,971 in March to 3,462 in April. But more asylum seekers, primarily from Nigeria, Gambia, Somalia and other Sub-Saharan countries, are now making their way to Italy (9,149 in April), U.N.H.C.R. figures show.

[In 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the EU border agency Frontex, quoted by Al Jazeera, “the number of refugees who arrived on Europe’s shores plunged by nearly two-thirds, but the number of those who died on the often perilous journey in the Mediterranean Sea rose sharply. About 364,000 people seeking work or refugee protection crossed the sea between January and December, compared to more than one million in 2015.]

“The refugee routes are changing but they don’t stop”, cautions Rui Marques. “I firmly support cooperation with Turkey but the deal [with President Erdoğan] provides an ill-fated compensatory package. Europe should not reward good behavior. Our values should be more important than our interests. The agreement is failing. It was a lost opportunity.”

Turkey is not complying with the promises made to the European Commission to guarantee temporary protection to refugees returning from Greece. “Some have been arbitrarily arrested, while others were detained for begging on the streets or selling tissues,” reports the Turkish human rights organization Mülteci Der, quoted by Spiegel Online.

“The Pakistanis, Afghans and Algerians who were deported from the islands of Lesbos and Chios in early April were almost all sent to a detention center in Kirklareli on the Turkish-Bulgarian border.”

Greek officials scaled down the procedures to send refugees back to Turkey, alleging that Turkey “is not a safe third country.” Amnesty International added fuel to this claim denouncing that “hundreds of refugees” have been forcibly deported from Turkey to Syria. Others were shot by troops at the Syrian-Turkish border.

Rui Marques refuses to condemn Turkey’s overcrowded and insanitary confinement camps. “We have to look first at European camps, where children have been detained in dreadful conditions. There are horrifying stories about refugees being abused by traffickers. We need to be coherent and look at our own actions” before criticizing a country already holding 2.5 million refugees.”

“The E.U. assistance to Turkey is five years late,” he says. “We pretended for too long that it was not our business. We have been distancing ourselves from our values, embracing nationalism, which is the last station before war. We ignored how people were prepared to risk everything – to risk their lives.”

Or, as Somali-British poet Warsan Shire wrote: “You have to understand/no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land.”

“Following the closure of the Balkans’ route to Europe, thousands of refugees are stranded, exposed to violence at the hands of border police or smugglers. Babies as young as six weeks have been treated for exposure to tear gas and ten-year old children for rubber bullet wounds.”

“Europe has decided to stop thousands of people from moving through Greece but it did not properly plan how to address their basic needs. This was a fully predictable crisis, caused by the deliberate neglect of European governments and institutions.”

“Near the Albanian border, in Ioannina City, the Katsikas military-run camp hosts 1,500 asylum seekers who spend their days in the heat and freeze at night”, says the aid group. “They sleep in tents without mattresses and have nothing to keep warm on the cold, hard, and rocky ground.”

“For months MSF has spoken out about a shameful European response focused on deterrence rather than providing people with the assistance and protection they need”, says Jérôme Oberreit, MSF’s international secretary general.

“The EU-Turkey deal goes one step further and has placed the very concept of ‘refugee’ and the protection it offers in danger. We are calling on European governments to shift priorities: rather than maximising the number of people they can push back, they must maximise the number they welcome and protect.”

A magical volunteer

Kerrie Moor is an English “full time independent volunteer” currently living in Muğla, a city in southwestern Turkey. A former job and career recruiter, she worked in the Greek island of Lesbos, from December 2015 to April 2016, under the umbrella of the NGO Better Days for Moria. This is her story, told to via Facebook:

“Last summer I was in Fethiye [Muğla province] when I noticed that many refugee camps were going up around the area. Friends and I started collecting aid and clothes from the locals and asking the holidaymakers to bring donations.

This rapidly grew into needing storage space. Little did I know I would soon be delivering aid as far as Adana, a 14-southern province, entailing a 14-hour bus ride. The need there, with an estimated 300,000 refugees, was 100 times bigger [than in Muğla].

In September the image of three-year old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, after he drowned on the beach in Bodrum, broke my heart. I booked my flight to Athens, for December 28. Closer to the date, I started to get very nervous. What did I have to offer?

It was so cold by this time and I had never worked in such conditions. But if these refugees could travel to safety in this weather despite all the dangers I had to do this.

I packed trousers, t-shirts, hoodies, thick socks and work boots. Little I realised these were to be my staple wardrobe for five months.

On arriving in Lesbos after taking a huge ferry from Athens Pireus to Mytilini, I can remember making myself stand outside on the deck, in the dark, to try and experience what it must be like to be on a tiny life raft, packed with families.

The way the water rose and fell around the ferry that night made me imagine how high the walls of water must appear to a small person in a tiny life raft. It sent shivers up my spine. How did people survive the terror of those trips?

I immediately got in a taxi to the Better Days For Moria camp as I had already been in touch and decided to support this NGO. Refugees were bunched in groups around the cafes and the port.

It was like a prison with barbed wire topping the high walls that surrounded it. I remember being told ‘don’t worry, its an old army detention center’.

It was the only facility big enough on the island to house this quantity of people. In time it became a prison. It was obviously pre-planned as all the facilities on the other islands turned out to be the same. And more were being prepared in the months to come.

We started a transit camp situated next to the detention center that was used to register all newly-arriving refugees. We welcomed thousands of guests. We clothed, fed, watered, and provided medical care to anyone that needed it.

A hug can be the most meaningful thing in the world following a tragedy. They needed to learn how to trust humanity. I believe we delivered that in a magical way.

After the deal with Turkey, the border police and coastguard started picking up the refugee boats on the water and delivering them directly to the hotspot, thus it became a closed camp.

The Greek authorities could not maintain the upkeep of the refugees’ basic needs and, initially, they refused to allow anyone to help them. They quickly realized they were not going to manage without support.

Food lines were desperately long; food, in short supply and protests continue to happen even now because their needs are not met. Some conditions are inhumane: sleeping arrangements, food quality, toilets and shower facilities.

Europe’s deal with [President] Erdogan was not worth the paper it was written on. Millions of dollars exchanged hands. Turkey allowed same people to travel to E.U. countries. But only those who previously to the March 30 agreement had not broken the law, by crossing the sea, and who had previously applied for the family reunification program.

At this point, the system became one where every single refugee needed a lawyer and a team to achieve asylum or relocation.

Each case is labour intensive and we have had to create strategies for them to feel like they are living rather that just waiting for a system that treats them for what they are. Forgotten and swept under the proverbial carpet.

At times, I lost faith in humanity but now I realise volunteers are special. We fight prejudice and racism. We are voices for the unheard, feeding hope to those who have lost everything and more.”